Killeen, P. R., Hall, S. S., Reilly, M. P., & Kettle, L. C. (2002).
Molecular analyses of the principal components of response strength.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
78, 127-160.
Killeen and Hall (2001) showed that a common factor called
strength underlies the key dependent variables of response
probability, latency, and rate, and that overall response rate is
a good predictor of strength. In a search for the mechanisms that
underlie those correlations, this article shows that (a) the
probability of responding on a trial is a two-state Markov
process; (b) latency and rate of responding can be described in
terms of the probability and period of stochastic machines called
clocked Bernoulli modules; and (c) one such machine, the
refractory Poisson process, provides a functional relation
between the probability of observing a response during any epoch
and the rate of responding. This relation is one of
proportionality at low rates and curvilinearity at higher rates.
Key words: IRT distributions, latency, models,
probability, rate, pigeons, rats